Tom Papatheodore Tom Papatheodore is an HPC Engineer in the System Acceptance & User Environment group at
the Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility (OLCF) at Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL).
In this role, he develops and runs benchmark applications to verify functionality and
performance of OLCF’s pre-production HPC systems, works with OLCF staff and vendor partners
to support early-access users of these systems, and manages the pre-production training
program for these users. Tom also runs regression tests on user-facing software for the facility’s
production supercomputers, helps organize training events related to these systems, and
manages the OLCF’s involvement in an annual GPU hackathon series alongside NVIDIA and
other partner organizations.
He received his PhD in physics from the University of Tennessee in 2015, where he used the
OLCF’s Titan supercomputer to simulate explosive nucleosynthesis in the context of Type Ia
supernovae using the astrophysics code, FLASH. After graduation, Tom joined the OLCF as a
distinguished postdoctoral research associate in the Scientific Computing group, where he
worked as part of the Center for Accelerated Application Readiness (CAAR) program to port the
FLASH code’s nuclear burning module to run on the GPUs of OLCF’s (then upcoming) Summit
supercomputer. After his postdoc, he continued to work onsite at ORNL as a Solutions Architect
for NVIDIA before rejoining OLCF as an HPC Engineer in the User Assistance & Outreach group
in 2017. Then, in 2020, he joined the newly formed System Acceptance & User Environment
group at the OLCF, where his current work interests are GPU programming, porting applications
to run on novel compute architectures, and teaching HPC skills to others.